Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1859-1937
Years Abroad: 1891-1893, 1895-1937
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
on June 21, 1859, just a few years before the American Civil
War (April 12, 1861 – May 10, 1865). In 1879, Tanner
enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where
he would become Thomas Eakins’ apprentice. Tanner
moved to Atlanta in 1889 in an unsuccessful attempt to
support himself as an artist and instructor among prosperous
middle class African Americans. In 1891, he traveled to Paris
to study at the Académie Julian. He would return to the
United States two years later and turn his attention to genre
scenes of African Americans. Tanner sought to represent
black subjects with dignity. The artist addresses the
stereotype of the insipid, smiling African Americans
strumming the banjo in The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Tanner
portrays a man affectionately teaching a young boy to play
the instrument. The painting was accepted into the Paris
Salon of 1894. Tanner painted another African American
genre subject in 1894, The Thankful Poor. After his return to
Paris in 1895, Tanner established a reputation as a salon
artist and religious painter, abandoning subjects of his own
race in favor of biblical themes; The Resurrection of Lazarus,
1896 and The Pilgrims of Emmaus, 1905 are two examples.
Tanner’s decision to give up African American genre
paintings may have been influenced by the amount of
negative images of blacks circulating in Paris at that time.